Many operational situations have a plurality of tasks requiring confirmation of the task's status. Examples include monitoring of the operational situation, testing before or during the operational situation, and preliminary review of the tasks. The tasks may be active, e.g., a degree of movement, or passive, e.g., positional relationship of a moveable structure. A conventional checklist for the operation of a vehicle is a well known example.
A typical operational checklist, for example, for flight operations of an aircraft, plays an important role to ensure a vehicle is configured appropriately before initiating a specific operational phase, for example, taxi, takeoff, climb, or landing. It also helps as a tool as a memory aid, as well as providing situation awareness and workload balancing in an aircraft multi-crew environment.
The typical checklist length is variable across phases of flight and type of aircrafts. It may be as short as five items and as lengthy as three pages (like initialization checks and smoke in cockpit checks) resulting in great variation in time and workload involved execution. For example, it generally takes longer to perform a preflight checklist than a taxi out checklist. These longer checklists could result in human errors, aircraft delays, or decreases in operational efficiency.
There exist multiple variations for checklists driven by prevailing or past situations, for example engine out landing checklist and engine out during takeoff-run checklist. The combinations can be high, and it can be difficult for a pilot to remember and recall these items under significant task pressure and workload.
Typical checklist items are statically defined and may not adapt to changes in prevailing or historic situations. The situations affect inclusion of new items in the checklist or exclusion of existing ones, or changes in target values of checklist parameters. For example, if De-Ice boots failure occurs during flight, pre-defined checklists still include a FLAPS items (e.g., FLAPS 30 during landing). FLAPS are not supposed to be used if De-Ice boots failure occurs so the new operational setting should be FLAPS 0. In another example, for situations demanding bank limit variations, the pilot is expected to remember the operational limitation. Such static (inflexible) behavior of the checklist items may result in human error (recall errors) and workload surge due to in-situ pilot driven adaptations.
Known checklist items are fully controlled by a human operator (pilot) and are executed sequentially. This may result in operational inefficiency making the checklist execution time greater, which could increase turn-time on the ground and may result in revenue loss for operators. Further, for disruptions in flow pattern, the pilot may have to reiterate the flow pattern, introducing operational inefficiency as current flow patterns are lengthy.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an adaptive system for confirming a status of a plurality of identified tasks. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the exemplary embodiments will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.